Waze is an awesome app. When it sees a segment is closed, it simply finds the next fastest route around it. While this is usually awesome, it can be not so awesome when Waze starts sending tons of traffic through residential neighborhoods that are full of kids riding bikes and playing outside.

I'd like to propose a way for Waze to designate official detours when a segment gets closed.

Municipalities designate official detour routes for many reasons. Roads that are designed to handle more traffic. Roads that have higher speed limits. Roads that don't go through residential areas. Roads that are safer for more and faster cars to be driving on. Waze doesn't know these things and just choose the fastest route even if it goes against those above items. This might be faster but reduces safety and increase the change of accidents.

My initial thought on how to make this work is:
When a segment is closed in WME, there could be a box to designate an official detour segment. Then any time a route is calculated that would have used the closed segment, it could recalculate a route that would use the detour segment as a waypoint of sorts to force the route to go the way it was designed, or to find a different route that circumvents the closure all together.

See the attached image for some closures near where I live. The RED segment is or was closed recently. The GREEN arrows are the official detour that go down streets that are designed to hold more traffic and are not residential. The BLUE arrows are where Waze directs people which is 100% through residential area with lots of stop signs (that people now don't stop for), tight turns, and kids. The PURPLE/PINK segment is what could be the Detour Segment. That way any routes that would normally use the RED segment would be forced to get recalculated to incorporate the PURPLE segment which would properly route traffic that way it was designed to go.

The alternative would be to not designate a detour segment but to designate ANTI detour segments and set segments that Waze would not use to route traffic. For that you could designate some of the segments near the blue arrows to tell Waze not to use those, but that might be trickier to figure out.

Anyway, after dealing with this firsthand all spring/summer long, something like this would go a long way towards making Waze safer for the people who live along the routes it decides to use.

Thoughts?